Category: Digital

We Need To Talk About Alan

Alan came into my life about a week or so ago. A message to Retro Garden – my retro gaming blog – landed in my inbox.

Alan’s email came from a generic Gmail address, but seemed to show passion for retro gaming, his avatar of the Psygnosis Owl that also stood him out from other people who are primarily looking for something. Also, something about his message was different to me. He seemingly broke all ten of the “how to pitch to bloggers” tips you see circulating on SEO Marketing Blogs. So I took my chance with him, half expecting an email back with a generic post embedded with links, that wouldn’t fit into my site.

However, Alan’s posts were superb. Well written, long pieces that showed a deep understanding of the genre. They were either fantastically well researched or they were games he played. One thing was noticeably missing from the posts, a link. Alan didn’t want a single bit of accreditation for the post. A bunch of emails back and forth (mainly my guilt trip) established that he was a chiptuner – a sub genre of electronic dance music that uses the original hardware to make tunes, so I linked to some of his work. It’s only polite.

So yes, as many of you who read this post do some sort of blogger outreach, let it be known is this is what you are up against. My blog is decent, though isn’t huge, but still get a fair amount of traffic to it and is one of those sites that gets a fair amount of requests. In fact in the past week this is what I get for Retro Garden (offers that generated a response are starred):-

  • Alan’s email*
  • 3 press releases for various Computer related stuff in the UK.
  • 5 press releases for gambling.
  • 1 Pitch to Alpha Test a PC game on Kickstarter*
  • 10 press releases for gardening equipment.
  • 16 RIMjobs – RIMjobs stands for “Relevant & Informative” Marketing Jobs. Poorly worded guest post pitches that contains the words “relevant & informative”, two words that make me close your guest post pitch quicker than a door on a double glazing salesman.
  • An unsolicited guest post on “When You Should Plant Petunias In Your Garden?” (seriously)
  • A request for a paid placement on the site*

Alan’s post you may think are one offs but it’s not the case, there are plenty of writers, particularly in fun niches, who are just looking to write out there. Often these are more attractive than your pitches.

As such, if you’re pitching to me, that is what you need to stand out from, and many other bloggers are the same. Quite a lot, in all honesty. So how do you do it? Well in short it is adhering to three simple rules.

It’s About Me

The amount of people who pitch their content to me like it the literary bastard child of Harry Potter, The Art of War and The fucking Bible is unbelievable. Also they focus on themselves, or their client, like I should be grateful that I’m being even graced with an email from them.

They then usually use the RIMjob phrase of “relevant and informative” as a way to describe their latest scribbling.

Newsflash for you folks: a “informative and relevant” piece of work is all relative. What you may have slaved over for the morning I may not like. Second newsflash for you: many “informative” blog posts are in fact not going on blogs designed to inform, but rather opinion pieces. Reviews are opinion pieces. I’ve never played more than the first 2 Grand Theft Auto games because I’m not a huge fan of them. I’ve also never played Resident Evil too. That’s not saying they’re bad games, just I’m not a fan of the genre or the game play or whatever. That is just my opinion. Retro Garden is 90% reviews.

I can understand why you are shying away from “opinion pieces”. They are controversial and could land you in hot water with the client. Try and think of offering your opinion rather than just a bland piece, maybe if you can get your client involved. Then, and only then pitch an “informative” piece. Pitch to me with the knowledge Retro Garden I have had probably only one real “informative” guest post, and that was a guy who tore apart a Japanese Super Famicom for a guest post. Unless you’re willing to go to similar lengths (and expense!), then it’s probably not a good idea to pitch an “informative piece” to me.

tl;dr: Read the guidelines, before kissing my arse & telling me it tastes of ice cream. You need to prove to me why I should give you an opportunity. Selling your content like my blog is worse off without it isn’t one of those things. Pitch ideas!

But Don’t Lie or Patronise To Me

This is a big one for me.

Look, I know why you are contacting me. I know why you are after giving me content, but don’t pretend it’s “just a little link”, don’t pretend you “are after editorial exposure”, and – worst of all to me – don’t pretend you’re a woman. I grew out of speaking to pretend women on the internet when Yahoo! Chat folded.

Be honest with me. That’s all. A bare faced liar annoys me. Don’t expect me to do work for free either.

tl;dr: Tell me who you are, tell me what you are offering, tell me what you want.

Make It As Damn Easy As Possible

This is the final thing about me – I’m lazy.

Yes, shock horror! But lazy isn’t a bad thing. Lazy people as pointed out by Bill Gates are the sort of people who find an easy way to do a hard job. I’m of the opinion that I spend 2 hours finding a way to do a 4 hour job in an hour is a good use of time.

As such, when it comes to running my site, I want the maximum results for as little as effort as possible. You may write the greatest analysis of a video game ever, but if I’m chasing you for images and corrections, then I’m unlikely to post it. It’s shocking as well how many times people don’t read the guidelines as well. Often (at least with me) guidelines are laid out on the “write for us” page usually, so if you don’t follow them, then don’t expect me to be very forthcoming with a response.

Final point about this – I’ve a lot of sites, some still going, some dead. Many use the same email address. If you contact me with an email saying “I want to guest post for your site”, at lease name the site as well!

tl;dr: Don’t make me work for your guest post. Trust me, I probably won’t bother.

I may come across as a bit of a dick with this (which is something I admit), but as a site owner, I get frustrated when marketers come to me peddling the same cookie cutter emails (often they are RIMjobs) for responses.

I know this isn’t everybody, and actually I’m quite open to many pitches. Furthermore I’m not the greatest outreacher in the world (there are so many more talented people than me at this!). Please just be honest, explain what you are going to do, work hard and butter my ego. It’s not that difficult, trust me!

Confessions of a WordCamp Virgin

I must admit, I’ve been suffering recently with what is jokingly called “Chronic Conference Fatigue Syndrome”.

You know the feeling, but are probably yet to admit it. The last few conferences I have been to have been a little bit underwhelming. More focus on how much drink is drunk afterwards. Politics. “Big Name” speakers sold as the next big thing from organisers who come in, charge a fortune that is passed onto the ticket for the privilege of selling to an auditorium. Itchy Lanyards.

ALWAYS with the itchy landyards.

So it was with a wee bit of trepidation that I attended WordCamp UK. My first WordPress UK Conference.

In short, it was a bit of strategy that I attended (nay, sponsored!) the conference. More and more of my SEO role at 3 Door Digital has been WordPress based, so I felt it was good to mix with the community a little more. So I attended with Alex & my mate John to the sixth ever WordCamp UK, in the leafy town of Lancaster.

The night before began in the leafy surroundings of the Water Witch, with a few other WordPressy types. It was a blast! WordPress’ trials and tribulations were discussed over a pint or two right over the canal. Genuinely couldn’t think of many better ways to spend a Friday night.

wordcamp1

So came to the conference, what of it? Well it was a “hackday” themed affair from my perspective. Not as slick as many other conferences I’ve attended, but full of well meaning and passionate people happy to talk about things. Food was pretty good too.

All in all, many – if not all – of the sessions I attended were enjoyable and had actual bloody takeaways from. Absolutely unheard of from conferences I’ve attended recently. However three talks that I learned the most from were the following:-

Three presentations caught my eye in particular:-

Taking Taxonomies Totally To The Top from Simon Wheatley (@simonwheatley), who’s talk gave some great ideas on how to take taxonomies to the next level, particularly when it comes to bookmarks.

WOW! Plugins 2013 from Kimb Jones (@mkjones), as any presentation with at least one plugin that makes me download there and then in the auditorium is worth a share.

The Base Ingredients for Debugging by Jenny Wong (@miss_jwo) was probably my favourite presentation of the day, largely because it was reassurance. I’m largely self taught in WordPress development, so am kind of finding my own way, so for somebody with a little more experience to stand on stage and say that the debugging methods used are similar to the ones I use is rather reassuring :). Furthermore, I’m now a convert into “Rubber Duck Debugging”!

The day ended with a social, and was quite a friendly and nice affair in one of the campus bars on the site. Unfortunately the bloody Race for Life closing off half of Lancaster’s bus routes prevented me from attending the second day, but I saw enough to re-ignite a fire for conferences.

And it was much less than the price of some conference tickets that exude all of the “qualities” discussed in the opening paragraph.

It was my first WordCamp, but won’t be my last. In fact, a troop of us are heading to WordCamp Europe in Amsterdam in a few weeks. If you actually want to learn about WordPress, I implore you to attend.

Big thanks to Primary Image for the images for this post!

bbPress Free Tickets Now Available

I’ve come back from WordCamp Lancaster and am still recovering, so whilst I write up that event, I’ve got a small bit of news.

This Saturday is my bbPress Book Launch Party (which is looking less and less likely I’ll actually have a book out by then, damn delays), and right now free tickets are available.

It would be great to see you there! Tickets are available until they’re gone.

bbPress Complete – Announcement & Launch Party

Otherwise known as “my big news from April as my April Challenge“.

I have written a book.

A genuine, published, “buy it in Waterstones if you ask for it but can buy it off Amazon no problem” book.

I was approached a few months ago by a publishing firm asking if I wanted pitch for the possible writing of a book. After a bit of research, and a pitch, I was accepted and for the last two months I’ve been scribbling away at a book.

It’s been hard, it’s been tough (writers block is so much worse when you have deadlines), but on or around the 19th of July, bbPress Complete (a provisional title) is expected to launch, all being well.

I haven’t done it alone, so a huge thank you to various people: Cass Brookes, Shane Jones, Alex Moss, John Wilson, Jem Turner, Joost de Valk, Nile Flores, Emily Clark & Adam Croft who have helped me or offered to help me in the process.

During one of those periods of writers block, I went out for a drink with Shane, and we decided that the best way to celebrate the release of the book would be a launch party on or around the launch date. As tonight I finally confirmed the venue for the book launch, I feel it’s a good point to share it with people.

The event will be held in The Nook in Chorlton, and is invite only. There will be free tickets available the week before the event, but for now, to gauge interest, there are only paid tickets, which includes a signed copy of the book (either at the event or as soon as I get the copies), and a free drink. To know how much I love buying drinks for people, that’s worth the price of admission itself.

To buy tickets, or to read more about the event, please visit Eventbrite.

So yeah, it’s been a secret for ages, I’m just delighted to share it. Feel free to ask questions/congratulate/mock me now. All I can say is yes I had a proof reader and no it’s not written in Welsh.

When Theme & Plugin Developers Work Together – Everyone Wins

So a blog post that has been doing the rounds in the WordPress Community has been “Do not buy WordPress themes that bundle premium plugins” by Coen Jacobs from WooThemes. In it it is a exasperation of the arms race experienced by many plugin developers when dealing with some theme developers, who are happy to include premium plugins in their theme.

As introduced in the post, one of the issues of including plugin functionality in themes is that you increase the load time and – in the desperate attempt to be all things to all men – you actually end up bloating your site with features you cannot replicate or don’t need. For example, you may notice this blog running slightly faster over the last few days. This is largely due to removing one plugin that was a legacy from the previous design, who’s functionality is no longer needed. Imagine if that was buried deep within a theme? It would take me as an experienced coder a while to remove the code, and a less experienced individual would probably just be stuck with the functionality.

It has gotten so bad now that at 3 Door Digital we now try to avoid buying themes, as wrestling with them to get them working takes longer than say using Underscores or Peadig to design from scratch.

The Premium issue is a problem, and is something that it took me a while to figure out a solution with WP Email Capture as with WordPress, all derivative code needs to be GPL compatible (which, in my case, it is). It’s something I’ve dealt with a couple of times as theme developers bundled the premium versions of my plugins with their theme, promising extra functionality. When you buy a premium plugin, you don’t just buy the plugin code, you also usually buy access to support and updates, which people can remove should they desire (Gravity Forms – for example – is a GPL plugin but has a solid TOS. I’m speaking with somebody now to get a similar for WP Email Capture). Whilst GPL developers generally are quite a helpful bunch, if you stop them feeding their kids (or in my case, my Pie & Pringle addiction) then – if you knowingly buy a theme with premium plugins attached – you should be able to understand that they may not be so willing to help if things go wrong.

Unfortunately, customers are often caught in the middle of this, and suffer the headache when they are stuck between a plugin developer who has no record of the premium customer, and a theme developer who doesn’t have a clue what they’ve packaged with their theme. The worst case scenario has been for me when a customer used a cracked version of a premium theme (that injected footer links) that was bundled with a cracked version of my premium plugin (that emailed every signup that ever signed up to a dodgy email address). This hack broke when the plugin owner tried to remove the footer links. Of course, both the theme developer and myself were unable to support it, and in the end we gave a copy of our plugin and theme, unhacked, for free.

I should add that I do have great working relationships with some top notch theme designers. Jake Caputo of Design Crumbs has been absolutely crucial in making my plugins more friendly to designers (you should check out his themes by the way), and my top affiliate has just topped three figures in commission last month alone (on top of his theme sales), so it can be rewarding working when plugin and theme designers work together.

So please do it! It’s been a negative rant, but if it means that more theme designers and plugin developers working on ways of complementing their products, rather than stepping on each others toes, then the community and customers will all benefit.